scholarly journals The Roman Church and Modern Italian Democracy

1920 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-183
Author(s):  
Giorgio La Piana

Among the many anecdotes about Pope Sixtus V, a stern figure of an Italian Pope-king of the sixteenth century, there is one which tells of an old Franciscan friar who had been a close friend of the Pope when the latter in his young days was a friar himself, known by the name of Felice Peretti, living in a small convent of northern Italy. When “Fra Felice” was elected Pope, his friend thought that Sixtus would not forget him and would call him to Rome and perhaps make him an important personage in the Curia. But no call came from Rome, not even an acknowledgment of the humble letters of congratulation sent with so many hopes by the old friar to his exalted friend. So he decided to go to Rome and speak personally to the Pope. After many hours of waiting in the antechamber he was admitted to the papal presence. Sixtus looked at him with indifferent eye as if he never had known him.

1947 ◽  
Vol 37 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 127-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Seston

The author of the Vita Constantini (traditionally and persistently identified with Eusebius, despite the silence of St. Jerome), tells us that Constantine ‘at a banquet he was giving to the bishops declared that he too was a bishop. He added these words which I heard with my own ears: ἀλλ᾽ ὑμεῖϛ μὲν τῶν εἴσω τῆϛ ἐκτὸϛ ὑπὸ θεοῦ καθεσταμένοϛ ἐπίσκοπϛ ἂν εἴην ’.In attempts to define the relations between the first Christian emperor and the Church, no phrase is more frequently quoted than this obiter dictum. In the sixteenth century the French scholar Henri de Valois rendered τῶν ἐκτόϛ as if it were the genitive of τὰ ἐκτόϛ, and since then it has been the practice to regard Constantine as an ‘évèque du dehors’: the Emperor either exercised episcopal functions though not consecrated, or supervised mundane affairs (that is, the State), after the fashion of a bishop, or else held from God a temporal commission for ecclesiastical government, the bishops retaining control of dogma, ethics and discipline. Each of these three distinct interpretations is equally admissible.


2020 ◽  
pp. 115-124
Author(s):  
Daniel B. Rowland

This chapter reveals the appearance of Saint Sergius in several omens and dreams connected with the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan´ in 1552 by Ivan the Terrible. It refers to Russian soldiers that experienced visions of Saint Sergius sweeping the places of worship, streets, and squares of Kazan´ during the siege, presumably cleansing them allegorically of their Muslim associations on the eve of the conquest. It also discusses visions and stories that testify to the remarkable place that Saint Sergius held in the memories of Muscovites in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even until after his death. The chapter shows some of the many ways in which Sergius and his monastery were memorialized during sixteenth-century Russia. It shows some of the means that Muscovites used to maintain the memory of Saint Sergius and create new memories of him.


2020 ◽  
pp. 119-140
Author(s):  
Joel Thiessen ◽  
Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme

This chapter deals with political and civic engagement, once more comparing the actively religious, marginally religious, and unaffiliated. In terms of political engagement, the focus is on the many ways individuals are or are not politically active, including who they vote for. Discussion is similarly given to volunteering and charitable giving habits, such as if people volunteer or donate money (or not), how frequently and where they volunteer or give, and motivations for volunteering and giving. The chapter concludes with some possible social and civic implications on the horizon for those in the United States and Canada, should religious nones continue to hold a sizeable proportion of the population.


Author(s):  
Jonardon Ganeri
Keyword(s):  
The Many ◽  

Among the many fragmentary texts that remain as Pessoa’s literary bequest are notes for what may have been intended as a philosophical novel. Dating from 1914, the following sketch is of particular interest: I do not know who I am, what soul I have. When I speak with sincerity, I do not know with what sincerity I speak. I am variously other than a self that I do not know exists (if it is those others) … I feel multifaceted. I am like a room with innumerable fantastic mirrors that distort false reflections, a single previous reality that is not in any and is in all. As the pantheist feels as if a wave, star, and flower, I feel as if various beings. I feel myself living other lives, in myself, incompletely, as if my being participated in all men, incompletely in each, individuated by a sum of non-selves synthesized into a dummy self....


1946 ◽  
Vol 3 (02) ◽  
pp. 223-233
Author(s):  
Octaviano Valdés

Mexico had many outstanding Franciscan missionaries in the sixteenth century. One of the greatest of those was Fray Francisco de Tembleque. A deeply religious man, whose every action was based on charity, Fray Francisco was at the same time a colorful figure and he merits a place of honor in the hearts of men. Little is known about him because liistorians have depicted for us only the salient chapters of his life, leaving the rest obscure. Even the date of his death has not been found in the many chronicles of his day. As we shall see, he arrived in New Spain around the year 1540. Fr. Jerónimo de Mendieta tells us that “Fr. Francisco de Tembleque, a native of the town of Tembleque, near Toledo, came with Fr. Juan de Romanones from the Province of Castilla. Both were inseparable companions during their sojourn in New Spain. He acquired a sufficient knowledge of the Aztec language to enable him to hear confessions in that tongue. But he never was capable of preaching in that language from memory. He always read his sermons and instructions to the Indians, and that very satisfactorily.” In this regard he was no equal to his talented brother, Fr. Juan de Romanones, who, “having mastered the Mexican language, preached to the natives and labored among them for over 40 years, being an able speaker. He wrote sermons and other works and translated parts of the Holy Bible, a work of invaluable aid to both himself and to other friars in preaching to the Indians. He was one of the best linguists Mexico ever had.”


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
Fahd Mohammed Taleb Al-Olaqi

<p>There is no ambiguity about the attractiveness of the Moors and Barbary in Elizabethan Drama. Peele’s <em>The Battle of Alcazar</em> is a historical show in Barbary. Hence, the study traces several chronological texts under which depictions of Moors of Barbary were produced about the early modern stage in England. The entire image of Muslim Moors is being transmitted in the Early Modern media as sexually immodest, tyrannical towards womanhood and brutal that is as generated from the initial encounters between Europeans and Arabs from North Africa in the sixteenth century and turn out to be progressively associated in both fictitious and realistic literatures during the Renaissance period. Some Moors are depicted in such a noble manner especially through this drama that has made them as if it was being lately introduced to the English public like Muly (Note 1) Abdelmelec. Thus, the image of Abdelmelec is a striking reversal of the traditional portrayal of the Moors. This protagonist character is depicted as noble, likeable and confident. He is considerately a product of the Elizabethan playwrights’ cross-cultural understanding of the climatic differences between races of Moorish men.</p>


1869 ◽  
Vol 15 (70) ◽  
pp. 169-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Maudsley

Few are the readers, and we cannot boast to be of those few, who have been at the pains to toil through the many and voluminous writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. Indeed, it would not be far from the truth to say that there are very few persons who have thought it worth their while to study him at all seriously; he is commonly accounted a madman, who has had the singular fortune to persuade certain credulous persons that he was a seer. Nevertheless, whether lunatic or prophet, his character and his writings merit a serious and unbiased study. Madness, which makes its mark upon the world, and counts in its train many presumably sane people who see in it the highest wisdom, cannot justly be put aside contemptuously as undeserving a moment's grave thought. After all, there is no accident in madness; causality, not casualty, governs its appearance in the universe; and it is very far from being a good and sufficient practice to simply mark its phenomena, and straightway to pass on as if they belonged, not to an order, but to a disorder of events that called for no explanation. It is certain that there is in Swedenborg's revelations of the spiritual world a mass of absurdities sufficient to warrant the worst suspicions of his mental sanity; but, at the same time, it is not less certain that there are scattered in his writings conceptions of the highest philosophic reach, while throughout them is sensible an exalted tone of calm moral feeling which rises in many places to a real moral grandeur. These are the qualities which have gained him his best disciples, and they are qualites too uncommon in the world to be lightly despised, in whatever company they may be exhibited. I proceed then to give some account of Swedenborg, not purposing to make any review of his multitudinous publications, or any criticism of the doctrines announced in them with a matchless self-sufficiency; the immediate design being rather to present, by the help mainly of Mr. White's book, a sketch of the life and character of the man, and thus to obtain, and to endeavour to convey, some definite notion of what he was, what he did, and what should be concluded of him.*


1965 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 47-50
Author(s):  
Jerome Roche

Santa Maria Maggiore at Bergamo was one of the principal churches at which music was made in early seventeenth-century northern Italy. It had built up a considerable reputation in the sixteenth century which was continued into the next under a succession of prominent musicians, the most important of whom was Alessandro Grandi. He occupied the post of maestro from 1627 to 1630, and, as with every newly appointed choirmaster, the choir's accumulated repertory was formally consigned to him. The documents of consignment are preserved in a volume marked Inventarium (LXXIX-1) in the archives of the Misericordia Maggiore, which ran the church. I now print below the inventory that Grandi signed in 1628 – the first one of the seventeenth century; it is on ff. 129v-130 of the Inventarium. I have set it out unedited in the layout in which it appears there.


1886 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 2-22
Author(s):  
J. S. Mackay

Chasles in his Aperçu, Historique sur l'origine et le développement des Méthodes en Géométrie (seconde édition, 1875, pp. 214–215) makes the following statement:“Essays of the same kind as the geometry of the rule and that of the compasses, and which hold, so to speak, the mean between the two, had long previously engaged the attention of famous mathematicians. Cardan first of all in his book De Subtilitate had resolved several of Euclid's problems by the straight line and a single aperture of the compasses, as if one had in practice only a rule and invariable compasses. Tartalea was not long in following his rival on this field, and extended this mode of treatment to some new problems. (General trattato di numeri et misure; 5ta parte, libra terzo; in-fol. Venise, 1560). Finally, a learned Piedmontese geometer, J.–B. de Benedictis, made it the object of a treatise entitled: Resolutio omnium Euclidis problematum, aliorumque ad hoc necessario inventorum, una tantummodo circini data apertura; in-4°. Venise, 1553.”


2010 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 266-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Blank

AbstractThe sixteenth-century physician and philosopher Julius Caesar Scaliger combines the view that living beings are individuated by a single substantial form with the view that the constituents of the organic body retain their identity due to the continued existence and operation of their own substantial forms. This essay investigates the implications of Scaliger's account of subordinate and dominant substantial forms for the question of the constancy of biological species. According to Scaliger, biological mutability involves not only change on the ontological level of accidents but, in some cases, also change on the level of substantial forms. While he shares the received view that substantial forms themselves cannot undergo change, he maintains that relations of domination and subordination between substantial forms can undergo change. He uses his theory of how such changes can occur to explain cases of revertible plant degeneration. Moreover, in his view plants that belong to previously unknown biological species can emerge from changes in the relations between the many forms contained in plant seeds.


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